Buikspraak/Gutspeak, Commune.1 Press Release, April 23, 2015
23 April – 20 May 2015
Commune.1 presents an exciting new body of work by Dominique Edwards that has been two years in the making. The exhibition will span the entire gallery space and is executed using a range of both traditional and unconventional materials including ink on paper, photography, video projection, packing tape, found objects, hand-made paper, automated dowsing rods, glue, mops, plastic and more.
‘Buikspraak’, translated literally into English as ‘gutspeak’ or, by definition, as ventriloquism, is used in both literary and colloquial contexts to question the sincerity behind the voice. Edwards explores the visceral signals (e.g. gut feelings) that bypass the rational and ideologically infused language centres of the brain and point instead to a phenomenology of presence, complicated by questions of agenda and authenticity: what is the gut, who is the puppeteer, when it speaks, who do I hear – how many voices inhabit this frilly place? These questions combine with a strong visual evocation of density, matter and space to speak of the processes of artistic creation – how the gut informs the marks made and the materials used; and to questions about being in the world, knowing what we know and our entanglement with the matter and environment.
In contrast to these wider ontological concerns, there is a personal and localised enquiry into notions of place. For Edwards, place is an ongoing theme that draws on familial history in Barkly West, Kimberley, and on Afrikaner heritage and language. It is the gut level of language – inscribed as poetic imagery – and its connections to place that encourage a form of embodied cognition. Thus, Edwards looks to traversing the spaces between the two ‘languages’ – the gut brain and the thinking brain – both of which are ‘of the body’ yet which respond to different sensory inputs and have different feedback mechanisms.
This work can also be read in relation to current research on neural activity in the gut and the microbiome; to themes of consciousness, alternative intelligence, post humanism and deep ecology.